Trans-Asian Railway

The Trans - Asian Railway ( TAR; German: Trans- Asian Railway ) is a project of the UN ESCAP to create a 80,900 km long rail network for rail freight through Asia and Europe.

History

This project was started in the 1960s with the aim to obtain a continuous 14,000 km long rail link between Singapore and Istanbul ( and other connections to Europe and Africa ). Since at this time the ship and air traffic was not as well developed as it is today, this project promised a significant reduction in transport times and costs between Europe and Asia. The further progress of the project has been hampered in the following decades by various political and economic hurdles. It was only in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, the prospects increased to realize a rail crossing in the Asian continent.

Objectives

With the TAR, it is hoped to be able to absorb the rapidly increasing freight traffic between the Eurasian countries and also to improve access to landlocked countries like Laos, Afghanistan, Mongolia and the Central Asian republics.

Planning

A large part of the railway network already exists, but there are still several crucial gaps. A problem are the different track gauges in different countries: In Iran, China and Korea, the 1435 mm standard gauge is used in North and Central Asia is largely the 1520 mm broad gauge used in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka used a 1676 mm broad gauge, and a large part of Southeast Asia used the meter gauge. On the TAR would be sacrificing a large extent on the Umspuren but to tranship containers to other trains using appropriate transshipment stations.

The four corridors were added to 2001 in the plans:

• The northern corridor linking Europe and the Pacific over Germany, Poland, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China and Korea. This leads to changes in track width between Poland and Belarus and between Kazakhstan and Mongolia and China. Much of this route is covered by the 9200 km long Trans-Siberian Railway, which already plays an important role in freight transport. Because of the isolation policy of North Korea from South Korea goods have to be transported by ship to Vladivostok.

• The Southern Corridor runs from Europe to Southeast Asia via Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar to Thailand. More distance branches lead to Yunnan (China) and via Malaysia to Singapore. There are gaps while still between India and Myanmar, between Myanmar and Thailand, between Thailand and Cambodia, between Cambodia and Vietnam and between Thailand and Yunnan. The track width varies between Iran and Pakistan, between India and Myanmar and between Thailand and China.

• A Southeast Asian network

• The north-south corridor linking northern Europe to the Persian Gulf; he starts in Helsinki and through Russia to the Caspian Sea, where it divides into three branches: The western route through Azerbaijan, Armenia and the western Iran.
• The middle route is by ferry across the Caspian Sea in Iran.
• The eastern route passes through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in the east of Iran.

Progress

In the Southern Corridor, the gap between Bam and Zahedan in Iran in 2009 has been closed. In August of the same year a test train drove in 14 days from Islamabad to Istanbul. In the East direction, the first test train ran a year later in nine days. The transshipment of containers between trains of different gauges made ​​in the Iranian border town of Zahedan.